In a world… where water is currency, a look at all things pop culture through zany judge-y Korean eyes.

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My Top Ten Desert Island Discs

I hate this proposal: if you were deserted on an island, what ten discs would you bring? It’s such a stupid question, so stupid, for it is unlikely that you are even going to have electricity. Also, listening to music is a luxury, living on a deserted island is the total opposite. Any sense of me time is more like, how am I going to survive through the night time? Like the end theme of Gilligan’s Island says, “Not a single luxury.” Words to live by, or die by, kind of like aloha.

If you’re fortunate to any source of power, fuck the phonograph player. Fuck the 8-track player. Fuck the cassette deck. Fuck the cd player. Fuck the mini cd player. Fuck the mini recordable cd player. Fuck the mp3 player. Fuck the Windows media player. No, seriously, fuck the Windows media player, you elitist self-serving .wma creating piece of garbage seeking exclusivity. Fuck all the devices that can reproduce the tones of music, and get yourself an industrial-sized bug zapper. Be real, man.

This question can’t be taken lightly, because you know that if it really happened, you’re going to be held to what you say. That’s how things work. Odds are, I’m gonna be stuck with an Ipod with only three minutes of juice left, and right in the middle of the good part of “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” [3:18 to be exact], and due to a flippant answer be stuck with Air Supply’s Greatest Hits.

Of course, the person asking you the question is going to be all impatient and demand an answer. So after pondering over an existence of solitude on some deserted island with the possibility of no electricity, I came up with this album:

First thing I’d do is boomerang toss the worthless piece of vinyl into the body of water that surrounds me, and take eight seconds off for serious me time. Do you feel me?

It will definitely change the way I look at the foam that forms when the ocean washes over the sand.

4 thoughts on “My Top Ten Desert Island Discs”

Honestly, Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island a book that was compiled by Greil Marcus and consisted of rock critics telling us the one rock and roll album they would take to Desert Island, not ten. But you are correct that it’s a dumb premise. For a long time mine was Zen Arcade by Husker Du. But that might be loyalist Mpls hipster bullshit.

I saw Air Supply with Greg Grajek at ChicagoFest (yes, ChicagoFest) in about 1981. It was actually much better than I expected. He is now a Senior Vice President – Wealth Management at UBS Financial Services, Inc. in San Diego (I just looked him up), which is more or less what I expected.

In any event, glad to see you are blogging. Kurt Edwards and I would love to get together with you for a beer sometime if you are game.